FILM and theatre are overlapping increasingly in this multi-media age, but Henry Bell, the Stephen Joseph Theatre's new associate director, has taken a different tack to this sometimes unholy alliance.

His amalgam of stage and screen revolves around the cinema itself, the SJT's home being Scarborough's old Odeon building.

New writing talents were invited to submit plays built around that building's history from its opening as a cinema in 1936 to its conversion to a theatre in 1998, each writer drawing on the archives.

Screenplay could not been a better chosen title and the four short plays are performed in the McCarthy, the end-on stage that is still used to show films.

The screen comes into play to announce each show with sound designer Paul Stear's videos mirroring the opening to films through the ages from silent days onwards, while Lucy Weller's set design is restricted to two sets of two red velvet seats.

Bell's cast of three, Charlotte Harwood, Lara Stubbs and Paul Ryan, have shown their diversity already this season in the McCarthy's other summer show, Cox & Box – Mrs Bouncer's Legacy, whether playing cross-gender roles or illegal-immigrant Poles. Now they do so to an ever greater degree in this new quartet of quickies.

The quadruple bill opens with Jimmy Osborne's An Empty Seat, where Ryan's dinner-suited Henry is the town outcast with the aforementioned unoccupied seat beside him at the Odeon's sold-out gala opening night. Mae (Stubbs) is on usherette duty for the first time, initially discomfited but gradually fascinated by Henry's wartime revelations as to why he is ostracised. It is beautifully played by both, with so much going on under the surface.

Isabel Wright's The Illicit Dark seeks to mirror the tone and atmosphere of Alfred Hitchcock's The Rear Window, the suspenseful 1954 thriller showing as usherette Susan (Stubbs again, but different!) watches the mysterious upper-crust Jeanne (Harwood) being watched by the equally mysterious Charles (Ryan). What is each character's motive? All will be revealed in this darkly playful, yet sinister piece of intrigue.

The pick of the bunch is Kate Brower's Double Feature, set at a 1973 midnight movie double bill of The Wicker Man and Don't Look Now, to which Harwood's keen-to-learn Diana has dragged her reluctant, cynical, Luddite, chain-smoking, older husband Richie (Ryan, all sideburns and a terrible jumper). Art, education and the failing, fraying marriage of an unsuited couple are amusingly and perceptively depicted, with a devastating punch to the silent finale.

The SJT should snap up Brower for a full-scale play now, a status the theatre has bestowed already on Claudine Toutoungi. She returns in October with Slipping in the wake of Screenplay's fourth piece, Bit Part, set in 1998 as Harwood's fame-craving, frustrated wannaabe actress Julie and her sister Martine (Stubbs), a pharmacy assistant happy in the shadows, watch the Scarborough premiere of Mark Herman'sLittle Voice, in which they make their screen debut as extras. Sisterly love is stretched to breaking point, the comedy is pulled in the same direction, but Harwood, the find of the SJT year, is wonderfully entertaining.

Screenplay, The McCarthy, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until August 30. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com